The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

This is the story of an unhappy marriage. F. Scott Fitzgerald is a masterful writer, and he brings to life the misery of discontent and idle habits. An interesting but thoroughly miserable read. 3.5 stars. ( )

I guess the prose is kind of gorgeous, but it's hard to appreciate that when I spent pretty much the whole book rolling my eyes at the lowkey racism, highkey misogyny, general heterosexual nonsense and characters I couldn't stand. ( )

I actually like Scott Fitzgerald's books, but it didn't convince me that much. I think all the pleasures and sensations are too long for me. It could also have been made shorter to bring the contents of an 'impoverished' rich couple across at the end of WWI. ( )

Only got about 6% into The Beautiful and the Damned before I gave up. I also bailed on Tender is the Night. At some point I'll probably tackle This Side of Paradise just to confirm that I have no use for any of Fitzgerald's novels except Gatsby.

Every once in a while I will see a 2-star review for Hamlet, or Pride & Prejudice, or some such, and I will laugh at the hubris. That fact alone may explain why this is a 3 rather than a 2-star review. I fear people scoffing at me the way I scoff at those ridiculous 2-stars-for-Hamlet fools. So my fragile ego and the fact that Scott could write the hell out of sentence make this a 3-star. There were sentences so perfect in this I sighed with something approaching arousal. (Yes, great writing turns me on. Go ahead and judge me, but as a fetish advanced literary craftsmanship is rather tame.) The story in The Beautiful and Damned, on the other hand, made me sigh only with vexation. Gloria and Anthony are horrible characters. I don't say that because the are bad people or because I did not like them. They are bad people, and I did not like them, but often I enjoy reading about bad people I don't like. No, Gloria and Anthony are bad characters because they are one-note, charmless, stupid, lazy, vapid half-formed people. They are, simply, not interesting. This is a couple that makes Vanessa and Nick Lachey seem like Simone de Bouvior and Jean Paul Sartre. What happens to them does not matter. Was I sort of rooting for them to die in ditches covered with suppurating sores? Yeah, maybe. But I wasn't rooting with real gusto because I just did not care enough to bring any gusto to the party. The reading of this book brought on feelings of impatience and lethargy. I am no literary critic, but I am pretty sure that is a bad thing. Things improved in the last 75ish pages, but the improvement did not significantly redeem the whole. One good thing about the end of the book, the introduction of Dot made me realize there could be a character more unappealing than Gloria.

Also, it is worth noting that Scott really toned down his racism and anti-semetism in Gatsby and This Side of Paradise. Both were on regular and appalling display here. It is physically uncomfortable to read parts of this book even when you go in knowing that Fitzgerald was a White Power kinda guy. ( )